2) It’s in Beta and they have made that clear to their actual users

3) It’s in Beta. And paypal is more a donation thing atm

4) To fix major security issues rather, ugh, I dunno sitting on their hands and spreading viruses like patient zero

5) They have been notified and the domain will change.

and Bonus

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark.  It was a real loss.  The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.

But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo.  They weren’t the only ones.  And they won’t be the last.  It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc.  If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.

AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever.  So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories.  Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom - where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever.  Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.

Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away.  Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all - a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).  

So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom.  Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes.  You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are.  If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first.  If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.

Many Flickr users are upset at the changes.  They expected their photos to be archived there forever.  Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay - since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.

I fear that applies to fannish works as well.  Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution.  They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced.  Any commercial service can’t be relied on.

I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.

The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.

Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.

Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.

This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?

I know it’s tempting to leave and migrate to Twitter or Deviantart or whatever place to put your content due to the new policies, but DON’T. Let me explain why:

when your space is invaded, do you leave and let them take it? or do you stay because it’s YOUR space.

Leaving Tumblr won’t solve anything. As nonchalant as the staff is, if we leave, the new policy will stay in tact and NOTHING will be fixed.

We have to stay right here and tell the staff to go fuck themselves (Not literally, don’t harass the staff with threats or something) and do whatever we can to let them know their rules ain’t shit. Fix it.

it could take awhile. Weeks, a month, but we HAVE to kill this new policy.

Also they have made it clear by deleting the chronic pain, depression, and anxiety tags that this is no longer a safe place for me to discuss my physical or mental health anymore

I’m tired and disabled and I don’t see any benefit of me hunkering down and forcing change that I honestly don’t believe is coming

Reiterating: Pillowfort is opening up invitations again. It’s a $5.00 donation to their Paypal, and then you will receive a code when the site reopens (tomorrow?) soon. I’m grabbing an invite even though I already have an account in case someone needs one but doesn’t have that $5.00.

Yuri on Ice is one of those masterpieces that I want to know inside and out, as as I’m watching it again I’m catching its artistry of Show Don’t Tell. Everyone knows the obvious lovey-dovey moments between our two leads… but it’s the smaller moments that speak volumes, and the writers go extra lengths to ensure this. In this post I’ll be discussing ep. 7 starting with the kiss, to what we see afterwards in ep. 8.

Everyone knows the kiss scene. Everyone loves the kiss scene. But what happens after? First of all let’s talk for a moment just what Yuri must be feeling here. I mean his face says it all: 

Think of what Victor is to Yuri. “A glistening god out of reach.” “I’ve chased after him for years, trying to catch up to his genius.” Yuri idolizes Victor as a skater, Victor is the very person who inspired Yuri to do so well at skating at all… and now this “glistening god” just planted a kiss on his lips on national television. It’s more than a dream come true – it’s unreal. He can’t believe it. He’s in shock. After a moment like that Yuri is more than elated – he must be stupid happy; the surge of emotion so great the crowd and even the scoreboard just washes into a blur. And… what happens after the kiss? No kiss and cry. No waiting for the score. All we get is a recap from a much more composed Yuri, clearly having recovered from the emotional surge of the kiss to narrate. But he’s not narrating in real time – it’s a recap. Cut to Yuri in real time shortly after the kiss, and what do we see?

…I think he has awhile left before he comes back to earth. Just LOOK at that face. You can practically see the giant cupid arrow sticking out of his chest. Another note: Victor is also still blushing. You think Yuri’s the only one on a mountain right now? They’re both a blubbering mess. Not only that, but in this moment Victor just interrupted Yuri’s interview to say “Yuri’s already proven he’s the skater to beat this year. Now with the quad flip in his roster, I’m sure he’ll win the Rostelecom Cup and advance to the Grand Prix Final!” To the first-time viewer, both Yuri’s suddenly composed recap and Victor’s comment on the skating feels jarring – like the writers are sweeping our grand moment out from under us. THERE IT IS, they kissed – ! …aaaand back to the skating. When in fact, by avoiding explicit discussion altogether, the creators allow room to show the effect of that moment both on Yuri and Victor through their actions. Victor is bubbling with pride, barely able to contain himself even on national TV. Meanwhile Yuri just stands off in a lovestruck daze as he watches his idol gush over him to the world. In fact, when you take the enormity of the emotion into account here, it’s almost unfair to expect a rigid explanation or direct thought from either of them. As Victor himself said earlier in the show: “It’s an emotion, so why waste time trying to put it into words, you know?” To poke and prod our leads until they “tell us how they feel” would just cheapen the rawness of that moment. 

This is where I start reading in between the lines… but you have to in order to understand YOI’s brilliance. Check out the first real moment we get between Yuri and Victor since the kiss in ep. 7:

The shot starts with a close-up of Victor’s gloves tying Yuri’s skates. This is the first time we’ve seen this, and it goes without saying it’s a significant gesture. This is shown even more by the shot panning up from Yuri’s skates to his head. For a moment all we see is Victor selflessly serving Yuri with the upmost sincerity (What was that Yakov said at the beginning? “Victor doesn’t think of anyone but himself, he could never be somebody’s coach!” Victor’s action of tying the skates can also be likened to Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, the epitome of a selfless act) and when we get to see Yuri’s face, he is surprisingly calm about it. Wait – they have to be blushing a little bit, right?

Nope. Not at all. Whatever firehose of emotion these boys went through in ch. 7, it seems to have completely worn off. Again, to the viewer this can feel like we’re being cheated. “But WHERE is my cute moment?! HOW can they be so calm about this!?” 

First let’s talk about how much time has passed since the last episode. That was the end of the Cup of China. They had to go back to the hotel together. They had to get back on the plane together. Now whether that plane went back to Japan or straight to Russia is unclear, but I can speak from experience that airports and plane rides take a very long time. Then they had to get from the airport to the hotel – keep in mind they are in Victor’s country, and I’m sure he is thrilled to point out different culture tips and landmarks to Yuri. There is still no confirmation that Yuri and Victor are sharing a hotel room – this info is saved for ep. 10 – but we at least know from Victor’s interview and Yuri getting into the elevator that they are in the same hotel. In other words, there is a HUGE time gap between the emotionally charged kiss in ep 7. and this tying-of-the-ice-skates in ep. 8 – a time gap during which Victor and Yuri practically spent every second together. We get no explicit information as to what happened during that time, except that Victor and Yuri seem much more comfortable in the romantic element their relationship – particularly Yuri who before was a blushing, blubbery mess just at the sight of Victor. Who could forget this moment: 

Now from a storytelling perspective this part felt like fan service, mainly because it seemed sudden. Waitwaitwaitwait, this is moving way to fast! Why is Yuri acting all confident and seductive, where is this coming from!?

…until you remember the time gap. And you realize Victor and Yuri had to work out those crazy emotions somehow. And whichever method they chose, it changed the tone of their relationship completely. Yuri’s move seems to invoke a shared memory between them, confirmed by the fact that Victor isn’t blushing but fighting down a grin at Yuri’s hot breath against his ear. There is no discovery here, no embarrassed newness. There’s a familiarity between them that wasn’t there before. Look back up at Yuri’s face while Victor ties his skates. He’s not fangirling like he would have earlier in the show – like he just did in ep. 7 – he almost expects that kind of devotion from Victor, and he treasures it. Oh, they’ve come down the mountain alright. They’ve come down and moved on, and now we are in a totally different valley. 

A lot of the criticism I saw for YOI was that the story wasn’t as clear about Yuri and Victor’s relationship as it should have been. And I felt the same way… until I started paying attention to tiny details like this. The nature of their relationship couldn’t be any clearer – the creators just chose to SKIP what was probably the most defining moment for these two and then SHOW it through their actions after the fact. We don’t need to see what happened when Yuri and Victor got a private moment after the Cup of China. What little we see of them in ep. 8 tells us everything we need to know, keeping the focus off the more private aspects of their relationship and on the beauty of the relationship itself. Even better, YOI continues this method of storytelling through Yuri’s skating routine. He is skating to Eros, after all – and not without blowing a kiss to the judges, an addition to his routine that was only shown in this episode. And I don’t even need to comment on the way Victor watches him:

With episode 8, the creators are telling us: “These two have come leaps and bounds.” This is made clear when, as Yuri comes off the ice, the focus of the narrative shifts to Yurio. For the first time, we watch Yuri and Victor at the kiss and cry from a distance, and from a different character’s POV. This passing of the baton is brilliantly done, and leaves a feeling of (temporary) completion of Yuri and Victor’s arcs. I mean just look at them: 

No conflict here, folks, nothing to see! Move along, move along! … and the story does, until Makkachin swallows a steam bun and we have a new problem to tackle. Just to drive home the genius of this kind of subtle storytelling, check out this two-second shot of Yuri and Victor after Yurio’s performance:

I’ll be backing up this tumblr and collecting everyone handles in the morning but then I’m deleting this blog because this isn’t a safe place for me to talk about my mental and physical illnesses anymore thanks to their deletion of the chronic pain, depression and anxiety tags.

and I don’t think it will be a safe place to be queer and genderfluid

I don’t think it will be a safe place for fandom either

So what’s the point?

If you’re a mutual and want my email address to stay in contact just hit me up in messages and I’ll gladly share it with you

Otherwise I’m ineffectualdemon on pillowfort.io and dreamwidth. I’m also preciousbunnynoiz on Ao3

I am on discord but I barely know how to use that so *shrug*

I’m probably going to keep the blog until at least the 17th but then I’m gone from this helllsite

I’ll be backing up this tumblr and collecting everyone handles in the morning but then I’m deleting this blog because this isn’t a safe place for me to talk about my mental and physical illnesses anymore thanks to their deletion of the chronic pain, depression and anxiety tags.

and I don’t think it will be a safe place to be queer and genderfluid

I don’t think it will be a safe place for fandom either

So what’s the point?

If you’re a mutual and want my email address to stay in contact just hit me up in messages and I’ll gladly share it with you

Otherwise I’m ineffectualdemon on pillowfort.io and dreamwidth. I’m also preciousbunnynoiz on Ao3

I am on discord but I barely know how to use that so *shrug*

I’m probably going to keep the blog until at least the 17th but then I’m gone from this helllsite

About this…

If you’re someone affected by the platform’s definition of what they’re going to be banning, I strongly suggest you back up your Tumblr blog. RIGHT NOW. Info on how to do that is here.

I can’t think why my own Tumblr would be affected, but I’ll be backing things up too… because in situations like this one might expect the algorithm to get a little out of hand and make mistakes that one might or might not be able to recover from. (See this article.)

For safety’s sake – because I’d very much dislike losing the content I’ve shared with other people here – I’l be embodying my Tumblr content in a new Wordpress blog over the coming days. I’ll share the address here when it’s ready, for those who might be interested.

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

This is aimed at most NSFW instead of the actual problem which is the bots, pedophilia and other mental/political issues that could be dealt with.

Trying to remove most positive and other wise ok NSFW because YOU lacked the ability and time frame to remove bots and viruses from YOUR platform is YOUR problem and lead to it being our problem and now YOU are punishing the people on here for it. 

And the “no shortage of adult sites” statement is absolutely abhorrent that you view it that way. Some people don’t wanna go to those sites. Some people don’t like videos. Some people may want to explore privately or express themselves in ways that they don;’t want to do fully and publicly.  

Certain tags and things i can understand removing but reducing it to just talking about sex positivity …isn’t positive. You are TAKING away peoples right to freely express themselves. 

Ya know what i also remember from years ago when you yahoos took over the site? There was a big outcry about the possibly blocking of NSFW content, i laughed honestly because some of it was over dramatic. 

The weren’t wrong. You are. 

Before you panic too much, fandom:

text is not included, so your fanfic and RP is OK

nudity is allowed, including political protests, breastfeeding and illustration – it just can not include sex acts

your nsfw flagged blog will not be deleted immediately, and that filter will still exist

However, this will likely still be policed automatically, and if your stuff gets tagged you’ll have to appeal to get it back out.

And of course, this hurts sex workers, erotic artists, and probably survivors.

Since these rules will be policed automatically, I’m also guessing it won’t keep out the spammers the way they expect.

So.

A directory of social media handles so people can find you on other sites. Once you fill out the form (none of the questions are required so in theory you can just hit “submit” without answering anything, but you can also just View Here) you will be able to access, but not edit, a spreadsheet of everyone’s handles across their social media. 

As the disclaimer banner says, EVERYTHING you enter into this form is made public so you know, be careful. If you don’t want two of your handles linked…don’t put ‘em both in there.